October Novel Prep Challenge

I've considered using a spreadsheet before. It has a lot of obvious advantages. The tabs allow you to categorize things, and a spreadsheet is a very natural tool for creating the step sheet (or scene list, or storyboard, or whatever you want to call it.) Especially, the way it simplifies inserting things and moving things around, keeping columns lined up if one is tracking multiple character arcs, etc.

I do use a spreadsheet for timing fight scenes and dialog in comic book scripts. It's way too easy to have a character giving a long speech in way too short an available time.

But I suspect I have avoided using spreadsheets for other things because I use them all of the time on the job. There are many times when it seems like the company training course I took in Excel qualifies me for my job a lot more than my engineering degree does.

I'm often extolling the virtues of Scrivener (including elsewhere on this thread) so I need to note, spreadsheets are one place where Scrivener is not very strong. Basically, you have word processor style tables, and you can import spreadsheet data created elsewhere (with somewhat dodgy results.) Of course, most of the tasks that I would use a spreadsheet for, you just do a different way in Scrivener, but there is a reason I go out to an external program to do timing, then bring the results back. Despite having excellent features for script writers otherwise, this is just one place where it just doesn't "excel". (Sorry )
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Regards,
Eric Fretheim
Assistant Prep Leader, 2015 October NaNoWriMo Prep Challenge

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage-- as long as you edit brilliantly." ~C.J. Cherryh

“No, writing 50,000 words in a month is normal. You are not crazy. This is not insane.” ~Teri Brown